I recently attended the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in New York City where I convened three paper sessions on ‘The University and the City’ with my colleagues Bas van Heur (Free University Brussels) and James Evans (University of Manchester). The sessions were sponsored by the Applied Geography Specialty Group and the Urban Geography Specialty Group and included fifteen papers on a variety of ideas about the spatial, political, and social aspects of institutions of higher education as they relate to their urban surroundings. Presentations included:
Tom Becker (University of Luxembourg)
‘Building a campus from scratch: the urban and regional dimension of the ‘Cité des Sciences’ in Esch-Belval/ Sanem, Luxembourg’
Jan Fischer (Oxford Brookes University)
‘Housing, Parking, and Marketing: Conflict over City Space in Oxford’
Heike Joens (Loughborough University) and Mike Heffernan (University of Nottingham)
‘After Redbrick: Debating the Location of British Universities in the 1960s’
Darren P Smith (Loughborough University)
‘The changing studentscapes of university towns’
Brian Ackerman (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)
‘Bridges to Favelas: How campus planners are trying to integrate the campus of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro with its surrounding neighborhoods’
Caroline Newton (Sint-Lucas School of Architecture)
‘UniverCity: Spatial interventions for democratizing urban space’
Jennifer Karlin (University of Chicago)
‘Re- Spacializing “The Clinic”: Constructing Communities and Transforming Chicago’s Southsiders into Healthy Subjects’
Nathaniel Laywine (McGill University) and Melissa Tanti (McMaster University)
‘Creating a ‘Contact Zone’: Negotiating the Boundaries of an Urban Classroom’
Eliot Tretter (University of Texas at Austin)
‘Interstate Competition and The University of Texas at Austin: The Geographies of the High-Technology Sector and the Birth of the Entrepreneurial University’
David Hassenzahl (Chatham University), Michael Finewood (Chatham University), Jessica Mooney (Chatham University), and Alice Julier (Chatham University)
‘Transcending Urban/Suburban/Rural through a University-Based Sustainability Mission’
Paul Vallance (Newcastle University)
‘Universities and sustainable urban development: institutional and academic roles’
Hélène Dang Vu (Université Paris Est Marne-la-Vallée)
‘Typology of universities as new urban stakeholders in Northern Europe and North America’
Kate Geddie (University of Lausanne)
‘Reconsidering university-city relations through overseas branch campuses: examples from the UAE’
Marc V. Levine (UW-Milwaukee Center for Economic Development)
‘The False Promise of the Entrepreneurial University: Academic Commercialism and Urban Economic Development’
James Powell
‘Creative Engagement and Leadership by Higher Education in Reach Out in order to Develop Creative City Regions – Deep Partnership’
Andrew Karvonen 